THE BALANCE-SHEET OF BOURGEOIS VENGEANCE.
Twenty-five thousand men, women, and children killed during the battle or after; three thousand at least dead in the prisons, the pontoons, the forts, or in consequence of maladies contracted during their captivity; thirteen thousand seven hundred condemned, most of them for life; seventy thousand women, children, and old men deprived of their natural supporters or thrown out of France; one hundred and eleven thousand victims at least. That is the balance-sheet of the bourgeois vengeance for the solitary insurrection of the eighteenth of March.
What a lesson of revolutionary vigor given to the workingmen! The governing classes shoot in a lump without taking the trouble to select hostages. Their vengeance lasts not an hour; neither years nor victims appease it; they make of it an administrative function, methodical and continuous.
Lissagaray's "History of the Commune
of 1871."
